For these new radical theorists, the enemy is no longer a ruling class, a hegemonic race or even a dominant gender. Instead it is the sexual order of nature itself. Oppression lies in the very idea of the ‘normal,’ the order that divides humanity into two sexes. Instead of a classless society as the redemptive future, queer theorists envisage a gender free world.

A specter is haunting America’s universities, the last refuge of the political left. It is the specter of ‘queer theory,’ the latest of the radical identity politics that have replaced class struggle and the classic proletariat in the schema of Marxist revolution. Amidst the din and clatter of utopias crashing messily to earth, the true believers once again are burnishing the agendas of social revolution. In ivied trenches from Berkeley to Cambridge, lesbian and gay activists busily work to unveil the latest weapon in the intellectual armory of the tenured left. “Queer politics is no longer content to carve out a buffer zone for a minoritized and protected subculture,” an academic manifesto proclaims. Its goal is “to challenge the pervasive and often invisible heteronormativity of modern societies.” The same idea is explained in less obscure prose in the pages of the Village Voice: “It isn’t enough to become parallel to straights. We want to obliterate such dichotomies altogether.”

The “dichotomies” are already being obliterated in liberated zones of the popular culture. A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer describing Michael Jackson’s international video Black and White, which was seen by half a billion youngsters across the globe, waxes messianic: “The refrain in the Black and White video is ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.’ Most riveting is a computer-enhanced segment where a person changes ethnicity and sex in rapid succession….In a world threatened by racial tensions and overpopulation, the survival instinct could summon a new human, one who has no single race and who, by being…androgynous, is less subject to the procreative urge.” Commenting on this, novelist Saul Bellow observed “The idea is to clobber everything that used to be accepted as given, fixed, irremediable.” The task (in the words of the previously cited manifesto) is “to confront…modern culture with its worst nightmare, a queer planet.”